Edeltuch Szmul

Edeltuch Szmul received transit visa no. 1322 at the Japanese consulate in Kaunas on 7 August 1940. The register records rabbinical student - mir yeshiva, aged 21.

What the register records

Nationality as recorded

Polnisch

Age in 1940

21

Occupation

Rabbinical Student - Mir Yeshiva

The journey

Reached Japan; reached Shanghai; aided by the Polish ambassador Tadeusz Romer; registered in Kobe for USA.

Where this comes from

• The Kobe relatives list — refugees at Kobe in 1941 recorded with their relatives abroad. Seventy-six pages in numbered sheets (LIST No. 7, No. 16 and others), each line giving a name, age, birthplace, occupation and citizenship, and then…
  Entry 45 of the Kobe community's list of refugees and their relatives abroad: born 1918 at Biala Podlaska.
• The JEWCOM register — the refugee register kept by the Refugee Committee of the Jewish Community of Kobe (Ashkenazim) at No. 6 Yamamoto-dori, 1-chome, whose cable address was 'JEWCOM Kobe'. Eighty-four pages on the committee's own printe…
  Entry 118 (also numbered 132) of the Kobe Jewish Community's refugee register: aged 23, born at Biala Podlaska, a yeshiva student, who arrived in Japan on 25 February 1941.
• JDC Shanghai migration file: EDELTUCH Szmul
  JDC Archives, New York collection AR3344, 'Complete Shanghai Migration Files' (NY_AR3344_00014), page 20: EDELTUCH Szmul, file no. 7848. Match: register No.1322 'Edeltuch zmul' (repaired: Edeltuch Szmul), and the register independently records this person as reaching Shanghai. Both name parts agree.
• United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Survivors and Victims Database — 'List of Polish war refugees in China', 242 names: the Polish (Sugihara-stream) group in wartime Shanghai, among them Gedalia Zupnik of the Mir, Chaim Ba…
  USHMM 'List of Polish war refugees in China' (242 names); the names closely match this register line — approved by the owner's review, 19 Aug 2026
• JDC Archives, New York — Shanghai Migration Files, box index (AR 33/44, file 00014): the alphabetical index to the JDC's Shanghai emigration case files, 1946-1950 — some 2,640 case files covering about 5,400 persons, each family under on…
  JDC Shanghai Migration Files, case file no. 7848 — an emigration case file opened for the family in Shanghai after the war; the file itself can be requested from the JDC Archives
• "California, San Francisco, Passenger Lists, 1893-1953", FamilySearch — index entry for Szmul Edeltuch, 1947: born about 1919, Poland. Digitised from NARA microfilm publication M1410 (passenger lists of vessels arriving at San Francisco)…
  FamilySearch's index of the San Francisco passenger lists, read by the archive on 20 September 2026, has Szmul Edeltuch, born about 1919 in Poland, arriving at San Francisco in 1947 on the General M. C. Meigs. The register's compiled line gives 1918, and the two are 1 year apart, and the name occurs once on the register. The ship's manifest heading says she sailed from Shanghai, and a passenger born in Poland landing at San Francisco in 1947 from Shanghai is the route's end: the refugees who waited out the war there. So the entry is taken as this person's under the archive's rule of 19 September 2026 for records from the route. The sheet is NARA microfilm publication M1410, film 387, image 726, read by the archive on 20 September 2026.
• UNRRA China Office, S-1132-0000-0181, registration of Polish rabbis and rabbinical students, their lists and sailings, Shanghai 1945–1946 (UN Archives, AG-018-001)
  In 1946 he was among the students accepted by the Hebrew Theological College in Chicago. (United Nations Archives, UNRRA China Office records.)
• Kestenbaum & Company, New York, auction catalogue: the description of a Shanghai family archive, 1930–1948, with the marriage contract of 29 November 1946
  Szmul Edeltuch married in Shanghai on 29 November 1946, and the couple came to the United States in 1947 and settled in New York, where they spent the rest of their lives. Their marriage contract and family papers were sold at auction by Kestenbaum & Company, whose description calls him a student of the Mir and a refugee in Shanghai — the yeshiva, the city and the year of arrival agree with the register's line and the archive's other records.
• La-karov ve-la-rachok, 28 March 1946 — the Far Eastern Palestine Committee's list of Jewish refugees in Shanghai (National Library of Israel, Historical Jewish Press)
  The Far Eastern Palestine Committee's list of Jewish refugees in Shanghai, printed by the Jewish Agency Search Bureau's bulletin La-karov ve-la-rachok on 28 March 1946, lists Szmul Edeltuch: born 1918 at Biala, arrived in 1941 from Lithuania; the year and the town agree with the Kobe Jewish community's refugee register, the Kobe community's list of refugees and their relatives (National Library of Israel, Historical Jewish Press).
• Yad Vashem Archives, Jerusalem — the card file of Jewish refugees from Poland who found refuge in various countries, 1939–1941
  Yad Vashem's card file of Jewish refugees from Poland who found refuge in various countries, 1939–1941, has a card for Szmuel Edeltuch, born in 1918, of Biała Podlaska, who was in Wilno during the war; the year and the town agree with this register line. Credit: Yad Vashem Archives.

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